Keeping in touch

Related Links

Andrew Zisserman, BMVA Distinguished Fellow 2008

Andrew Zisserman FRS graduated from the University of Cambridge with a
degree in theoretical physics and Part III mathematics. After PhD work in
physics, he saw the light in 1984 and began to work on computer vision at
Edinburgh university, as part of the Alvey project, the scheme to which we
can also trace the beginnings of BMVC. His work with Andrew Blake on the
problem of surface reconstruction produced a book, “Visual Reconstruction”,
which remains one of the seminal works in the field. The book was one of
the first treatments of the energy minimization approach to include an
algorithm (called “graduated non convexity”) designed to directly address
the problem of local minima, and furthermore to include a theoretical analysis of
its convergence. This work epitomizes the characteristics of Zisserman's
research: deep mathematical understanding coupled with an unbending desire
for practical results. It's easy to create impressive-looking mathematics
if you don't need to show it has a practical relationship to the real
world. Zisserman's mathematics is never difficult for the sake of
difficulty, but is firmly grounded in real problems in the real world.

Moving to Oxford in 1987, to join Mike Brady's newly founded robotics
group, he began to work on what was to be come one of the major movements
in the field of computer vision: multiple-view geometry. Initially
interest was focussed on geometric invariants, with an emphasis on object
recognition, and it was for object recognition that he first won the IEEE
Marr prize in 1993. Again, powerful mathematics was brought to bear on
real-world problems, moving on to 3D structure and motion recovery from
image sequences (and even single images), with demonstrations on real data
which were the envy of computer-vision conference attendees for a
decade. Two more Marr prizes followed, as well as a clutch of other
awards, and of course the famous book with Richard Hartley, which is
probably on the bookshelf of almost everyone in our field. Software from
his research group was developed by the spin out company 2d3 as a camera
tracker for the special effects industry. This was awarded a Technical Emmy
Award in 2002.

Geometry was successful in showing that computer vision could solve
problems which humans could not: recovering 3D structure from multiple
images required highly trained photogrammetrists and took a considerable
amount of time. However, Andrew's interests turned to a problem where a
six-year old child could easily beat the algorithms of the day: object
recognition. Leaving geometry to the rest of us to fill in the gaps, he
devoted himself wholeheartedly to the problem. Taking some tools from the
geometry days, and new ideas from information retrieval and machine
learning, his group has repeatedly heightened the bar on what computers can
achieve. From the seminal “video google” work in 2003, through the
formalization of the recognition performance assessment via the Pascal
challenge, he continues to drive the field forward.

His election to the fellowship of the Royal Society in 2007 recognized his
status as one of the pathfinder stars of the field of computer vision. I
am honoured to announce therefore that Andrew Zisserman is the 2008
recipient of the Distinguished Fellowship of the British Machine Vision
Association.